A Writer’s Odyssey: Peter Lefcourt’s Six-Decade Journey Through Hollywood’s Culture Wars

Peter Lefcourt sits in his California home, a place far removed from the Queens neighborhood where he grew up, as we chat on Zoom. He’s a veteran of Hollywood’s battles—a novelist, screenwriter, and playwright whose career has spanned six decades of American culture wars, from the counterculture of the 1960s to today’s digital, political polarization. His novels, including The Dreyfus Affair, Di and I, and The Deal, have become cult favorites, admired for their dark humor and willingness to skewer sacred cows. The Deal was made into a feature film, starring Meg Ryan, William H. Macy, and LL Cool J, but many of his best works have never made it to the screen, victims of Hollywood’s timidity and bad timing.

In his New York accent, softened by so much time in California, he tells me about his remarkable career, the projects that got away, and what it means to be a satirist in an industry that doesn’t always appreciate being satirized.

Karen Gaul Schulman: Where did you grow up?

Peter Lefcourt: I’m from New York, grew up in Queens. I lived there pretty much for my first thirty years, off and on. After attending Union College in Schenectady, I joined the Peace Corps—answering Kennedy’s famous call—and spent two years in the republic of Togo in West Africa, living in very primitive conditions and learning what it was like to live in a different culture. When I returned, I did what many young writers did in New York: I drove a taxicab at night and wrote during the day.

KGS: A taxi driver. That’s quite an apprenticeship.

PL: As an apprenticeship for writing, there’s nothing better than being a taxi driver. You spend your day listening to people talk. You hear the language underneath the language, the subtext, which is really what good writing is.

KGS: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?

PL: At fourteen or fifteen, I was lying in bed listening to my parents’ dinner party downstairs. It struck me that people weren’t saying what they really meant. I began to see—I was, of course, very judgmental, as most fourteen-year-olds are—how hypocritical and materialistic these people were. I think that was the moment when I began to say, well, maybe as a writer I can somehow describe this kind of hypocrisy. This will be a good way to make a living. My high school guidance counselor told me that was a bad idea, that I had no talent in English. She advised me to become an engineer.

And later, I was inspired by my first literary love, Lawrence Durrell, who wrote The Alexandria Quartet. The hero was a writer, and I thought that lifestyle was one I could relate to.

But my twenties were fairly shiftless. I wrote some, drove the taxi, taught at prep schools in New York, basically just avoiding the army. I didn’t want to deal with Vietnam.

KGS: You spent time in Europe during college. How did that shape you?

PL: My third year of college, I went to the University of Edinburgh, which is lovely, but after three months I found it too cold and dark and left. First to London, then to Paris, where I fell in love at first sight. I can remember arriving in Paris—smelling that mixture of Gauloise cigarettes, red wine, perfume, and garlic. This was really what I had in mind when I dreamed of Europe.

That year made me realize I wasn’t going to be a nice Jewish boy and become a lawyer or a doctor, the way my parents expected. During my twenties, they kept wondering what I was going to become. Their stock phrase with friends: “Peter is still trying to find himself.”

KGS: You got your start in television writing. How did you break into that field?

PL: My sister’s sister-in-law worked for ABC. At every Passover Seder, she’d tell me I should write for television. I was very snobby about it; I looked down on TV. But she arranged a meeting with Frank Price, head of movies at Universal Television. So I met with this very bored executive, who took the meeting as a favor to my sister-in-law. This was the era of Movie of the Week, and I was told that’s what I should write.

I sent them a script, an erotic thriller I’d adapted by taking out the sex to fit the TV movie format. About two months later, my phone rang. Frank Price from Universal Studios. Can they fly me out to California? They want to buy my story. Universal sent a first-class ticket and $2,500—a whole lot of money in those days.

KGS: Did that project get made?

PL: No, it fell through. But I decided to move to California anyway. I loaded up my Volkswagen and, with eight hundred dollars in my pocket, drove across the country and found an apartment in Venice for $140 a month. Venice was the place that all Easterners wanted to be. It was the beach, it was freedom, it was the arts, it was the whole California thing.

KGS: What was your first produced script?

PL: Let’s Switch, about two women—one married with children, one single—who envied each other’s lives and decided to trade places for a week. The idea came from conversations my sister-in-law used to have with her friends, the single women thinking about what it would be like to be married with children, and vice versa.

The movie was eventually made with Barbara Eden and Barbara Feldon, though I was rewritten to death because, I have to admit, I didn’t really know how to write a decent screenplay at the time. Still, I’d broken in. I did a lot of writing for TV and had some successes. In 1985, I won an Emmy for Cagney and Lacey, which put me on the map.

KGS: Let’s talk about The Deal. You’ve called it your “failed suicide note.”

PL: By 1989 or 1990, I was tired of television and Hollywood. There’s a saying, “Hollywood is a crapshoot masquerading as a business masquerading as an art form.”

I thought I’d move back to New York and write novels and plays. So I decided to write a book so cynical about Hollywood that no one would ever hire me again. It’s about a man who goes from attempting suicide to winning an Academy Award in one year. I wanted to write the darkest, blackest novel I could about Hollywood that would insult everybody and, effectively, bite the hand that was feeding me.

KGS: But it backfired?

PL: Spectacularly. Random House published it, and instead of ending my career, it became a cult favorite. Suddenly I was getting a lot of work, especially from the cable channels, from HBO, and from Showtime because of my growing reputation as a “counterculture writer.”

KGS: The book introduced Charlie Berns, who appears in several of your novels.

PL: Yes, he appears in The Deal, The Manhattan Beach Project, and Le Jet Lag. I dedicated The Manhattan Beach Project “to Charlie Berns, who refused to die.” He’s my version of Sammy Glick—the protagonist of Budd Schulberg’s Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run? from the 1940s.

KGS: Your novel The Dreyfus Affair has become legendary and has been called the prototype for Heated Rivalry. Tell me about it.

PL: In 1992, I created a story about two baseball players who fall in love and cause a national scandal. The title references the historical Dreyfus Affair in late-nineteenth-century France, when a Jewish army officer was falsely accused of treason, polarizing the entire nation. I asked myself, what could happen in 1992 America that would polarize the entire American population? Gay professional baseball players.

In 1992, there were no openly gay players among the seven hundred and fifty active Major League Baseball players. Thirty-four years later, there are still no openly gay active MLB players. I think this speaks to the homophobia in baseball. In the novel, the two players must navigate their relationship amidst that homophobic culture, their families, and eventually, the media after they’re caught kissing in a dressing room in Dallas and get suspended. The historical Dreyfus Affair was fueled by anti-Semitism in the French army. My fictional story would be fueled by homophobia in Major League Baseball.

KGS: How was The Dreyfus Affair received?

PL: When the book came out, it was a bit of a cause célèbre. It was immediately optioned by two producers at Disney—Wendy Finerman and Ellen Collett. They hired me to write a screenplay. But nobody told Michael Eisner, then chairman and CEO of the company, that it was about gay baseball players. Disney had just purchased the California Angels, and Eisner immediately killed the project.

KGS: But that wasn’t the end of it.

PL: About four years later, director David Frankel—who did The Devil Wears Prada—wanted it as his next project. Disney, forgetting they’d already killed it, optioned it a second time. David and I wrote a script together. When they discovered what it was about the second time, they killed it, this time burying it, I think, in a toxic waste dump in the desert.

KGS: Matt Damon recently gave an interview on Andy Cohen Live about loving the book and wanting to make it for the screen in the 1990s.

PL: In 1997, director Betty Thomas optioned it with Ben Affleck and Don Cheadle attached. This became a hot project. Everybody was talking about it. But Harvey Weinstein—now incarcerated—whispered in Ben Affleck’s ear that playing gay was career suicide. He dropped out, and the project collapsed.

The irony was that two years later, Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger won Oscar nominations for Brokeback Mountain. So it shows you the crazy serendipity of Hollywood.

KGS: How do you feel about all these near misses?

PL: (Laughs) I feel like a father who has a kid that everybody dates and nobody marries.

KGS: Let’s talk about Di and I. You wrote a novel about Princess Diana three years before her death. Where did that idea come from?

PL: CBS hired me to write a movie about the British royal family called The Women of Windsor in 1994, during the era when Diana was in the headlines. I went to London and met the British journalists who covered her. I began to think about Diana, that she was such a tragic figure. She really didn’t want to be a royal. She just wanted to be in love with somebody. She was such a good person at heart, in the sense that she wanted to help people, and she suddenly was thrust into the middle of this family of uptight royals—the Windsors—and she was truly ill-equipped to be a princess.

KGS: What happens in your novel?

PL: A writer is sent over to do research for a movie about Diana. He meets her and they fall in love. He flees with her to America, and they start a McDonald’s in San Diego. She changes her name to Sandy and is happy with her new life.

KGS: How was it received?

PL: In the UK, it got some very good reviews, but the sentiment was mostly that it was presumptuous of an American to write about the British princess. I went over and did some “chat shows,” as they call them there. Part of the job as a novelist is to go and sell it, which is the part I like the least.

KGS: What is that like?

PL: Oh, it’s terrible. I remember the days when they used to send you out on book tours. For my first five books, Random House would fly me around the country.

You’d arrive in a city late at night and be up very early the next day for the morning news show to be questioned by a local book critic, who often hadn’t even read the book. Then you’d go to bookstores to sign books and often face the fact that only five people showed up.

But the book signing I did for Di and I stood out from the rest. It was hyped up and prime time. It was at a bookstore on Ventura Boulevard, where there was a big marquee featuring my name. I showed up to find a table, chairs, a pile of books, and a big cutout of me and Diana. And I’m sitting there, and nobody shows up. Literally, nobody even goes into the bookstore.

Soon after, I realized it was during the two hours O.J. Simpson was on the freeway in his white Bronco. Everybody in the world was watching this on live television. O.J. Simpson managed to mess up my book reading.

KGS: That sounds awful.

PL: It gets even weirder; People Magazine sent a Princess Di lookalike model to come out and take a picture with me at a house in the Hollywood Hills that resembles a castle on these make-believe thrones. It was very tacky.

KGS: Was Di and I ever optioned for the screen?

PL: Well, it was controversial because of the Brits, but Fine Line optioned it and wanted to make it anyway. They wanted to turn Di into a generic princess to avoid a lawsuit. Meanwhile, Random House wasn’t afraid at all. My editor kept saying, “Please sue us! We need the publicity.” Of course, all that fell apart when she tragically died.

KGS: You’ve written political satires. Tell me about The Woody.

PL: HBO hired me in 1997 to write a movie about Senator Bob Packwood, a very inept sexual harasser who used to try to kiss women all the time. He claimed that he always took no for an answer. Someone said he got his dick caught in the zeitgeist. It was 1997, and awareness of sexual harassment was rising—before #MeToo.

I went to Washington and met with Bob Packwood and various Senate aides. I realized that the aides are the ones that really run the government. The senators are often just telegenic, presentable, articulate figures who don’t do a whole lot of work but get spoon-fed by their aides.

KGS: And that became the basis for the novel?

PL: Yes. I created a senator character who suddenly develops erectile dysfunction—this was pre-Viagra—and realizes that in America, the worst thing that can happen to you as a politician is to be soft. It’s a dark political satire that, like so many of my works, has been optioned once or twice but never made.

KGS: What advice would you give to beginning writers?

PL: I think that writers have a calling. You just realize that you want to be a storyteller. My advice is to just sit down and do it. Don’t talk about it or tell people you’re writing—just do it. It’s hard, and it never gets any easier. It requires an enormous amount of concentration and mental power to write well.

Also, at first, don’t edit yourself too strongly when you write prose. Let yourself fly and trust your imagination. I often don’t know how a book will end when I begin. With The Deal, I knew I wanted to take a character from a suicide attempt to an Academy Award. It was like planning a trip from New York to California but not knowing which road I was going to take.

At the same time, learn to be ruthless with your own work when it is time to edit and cut out the fat. As Elmore Leonard said, he tries to leave out the things that readers skip over. And learn to take notes from others. Writers want applause, they don’t want notes, but first drafts are first drafts. Readers have limited patience.

KGS: What about getting published?

PL: I believe you need to get an agent. Publishers won’t read unsolicited manuscripts. The old expression “over the transom”—throwing a manuscript over the window above an office door—doesn’t exist anymore as a strategy. The Authors Guild website lists literary agents. Write a query page, maybe a page or two describing your book, and hope that somebody likes it.

But you have to be realistic about the current marketplace. Literary fiction is hard to publish now because the marketplace is not particularly inviting. Genre fiction and young adult fiction are selling better now.

KGS: What are you working on now?

PL: These days, I’m mostly writing theater and poetry, as well as short stories. I’m working on a play about what would have happened if Marilyn Monroe and James Dean hadn’t died but instead got old in Hollywood. The play takes place in 1995, with seventy-year-old versions of Marilyn and James hustling to get a job. It’s pretty dark and I haven’t finished it yet.

I’m also writing poetry, which I consider the ultimate form—pure language. It’s very demanding and requires being very tough on yourself. It’s very economical; you can’t be overly expansive. It’s also musical, which I love.

– – –

As our conversation wound down, I was struck by Lefcourt’s resilience. After decades of successes mixed with near misses—from The Dreyfus Affair’s multiple failed adaptations to the O.J. Simpson–interrupted book signing—he continues to write, continues to tell stories. His career is a testament to the peculiar unpredictability of Hollywood.

Lefcourt’s novels remain cult favorites that capture moments in American culture with dark humor and honesty. The Dreyfus Affair, written in 1992, is more relevant today than ever, as Heated Rivalry proves. Di and I reads differently now after Diana’s death, with a poignancy Lefcourt couldn’t have intended. Even The Deal, his “failed suicide note,” succeeded in ways he never imagined.

After sixty years, Lefcourt is still writing, still observing, still listening for the language underneath the language. In a town hooked on tidy, happy endings, Peter Lefcourt has made a career of turning them sideways, making them a lot funnier and closer to the truth.